If they did or didn't is up for debate, but I'm pretty sure scorched earth was their goal from the start (specifically targeting the giants, Google and OpenAI). They don't want to be #3 in this race.
Every big new tech category in recent years has quickly matured into a duopoly of a closed, proprietary, premium option and a mass market, public, "open" one. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and a ton of other players are battling for the #1 option, but Meta has cleverly theorized that #2 is going to be easier and a better fit for them.
There was a clear leader 18 months ago. Then there was a lot of catchup by everyone.
It’s no longer “hard” build a product like ChatGPT + GPT 3.5, and that would include creating the model. There’s a few trade secrets, but it seems like not much beyond that protecting an ~8 month mote.
The leader always wants to be a monopoly. The distant runners up can catch up the most ground by playing nice, being open source, and working with other companies to erode the market share that the leader wanted to lock away.
I'm so glad to see this happening. I'm terrified of a single company winning all of AI. It's starting to look like this won't happen and that OpenAI is simply stretched too thin.
If this pattern holds, OpenAI may wind up as a footnote. Their inability to open up and work with others means that competitors and would-be collaborators will choose the open alternatives.
Meta can win that mindshare and be the friendly facilitator and rails that an entire ecosystem of business is built upon. OpenAI will never be that. They're not "open" enough.
Open models weren’t Meta’s original plan. The LLaMA 1 model was only available to Meta-approved researchers until someone leaked the model weights on 4chan in 2023. Meta issued DMCA takedown requests to HuggingFace and GitHub.
